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August 21, 2011

How Might Humanity Survive a Radically Changing World?

The Journey Ahead

Every journey starts with the destination. You need to know where you are going before you start working out the trip to get there. Even if the goal is simply to have new experiences you still have something in mind when you set out. This is as true for a journey of the mind as for the body. And it is just as true for the journey of humanity through evolution. Where are we going?

This will be the first in a series of blogs on the consequences of our rapidly changing world with regard to the future of humanity. We are entering a period of dramatic change. Our relation with the environment, the climate, and our access to high-powered fuels is undergoing radical reorganization. Everything about our current civilization is going to radically change as a result. This series is aimed at first establishing a vision of a sustainable future situation for some form of humanity and then providing some travel tips for how to get to that future. It will be an arduous journey for mankind. We will be facing terra incognita. No one has ever been in this environment before. So the uncertainties are legion. All we can do is keep a destination in mind and look for the signs along the way that suggest we are getting to where we want to go.

In this post I want to outline some ideas on where that destination might be. I base these ideas on several factors that are observable about our species today and the emerging clarity we have regarding the environment that is evolving around us.

In fact this is the point. The environment is evolving, to a large extent due to our activities over the last ten to twenty thousand years. A changing environment means that we have to evolve in order to remain fit to exist in whatever that environment turns into. Given the kinds of environments which have existed in the distant past we know that however radical the near future environment will be (e.g. higher sea levels, warmer average temperatures, biodiversity destruction, etc.) life itself will endure in some forms. These will be the seed for distant future speciation and a new efflorescence of the tree of life. That some form of future hominid, derived from genus Homo will exist I take as a given. But it also depends on how the current species of sapiens manages to survive the transition. It is to that issue that I turn.

My starting point is the end point. My inquiry begins with the question about what kind of life should humans expect to have even in a radically changed world. One early vision of the state of humankind subsequent to the depletion of fossil fuels was the Olduvai Theory of Richard C. Duncan, in the early to mid 1990s. Duncan envisioned a reversal of civilization and reversion of humans to the status of primitive humans whose remains are found in Olduvai Gorge in Africa. Aside from being a catchy title, the theory suggests that humanity will regress, possibly even evolutionarily, to a form that can succeed in the more primitive environment with only real-time solar energy to support it.

In other words, our civilization and the species we have become, are mere flashes in geological time. And now, as Richard Heinberg puts it, “The Party Is Over”.

In spite of agreeing with the Malthusian analysis inherent in peak fossil energy, population overshoot, and Homo sapiens' minimal average sapience, and all that those entail for the future of civilization, I am not inclined to think humanity is destined for the Hobbesian view of the human condition as “...nasty, brutish, and short.”

There are two basic reasons for my perverse long-term optimism in spite of my short-term pessimism (of course I would call it realism, but others disagree!) First, we humans have learned one hell of a lot about how things in the world work. Granted we are not good at learning how we ourselves work (mentally). But we have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge in the sciences and engineering and much of it might be applicable even in a low-power energy future. Our knowledge of systems science and systems ecology alone may make living feasible regardless of what the future world is like (within reason of course, we probably couldn't survive in a runaway warming that would lead to a Venusian climate!). There can be a technological civilization in the future but one that is not driven by frenetic needs to run as fast as we can run. Second, and most basic of all, is evolution. Along with our knowledge of how the world works we also understand the process of change itself. Of course devolution is possible, I don't deny that, but I also don't see it as inevitable. Our understanding of evolution, genetics, and especially the emerging field of Evo-Devo provides us with the potential to become intentional actors in the evolutionary process itself. We are already unintentional actors. We shaped the environment we live in and set in motion the forces that will shape the future environment. We have been embedded in a process of co-evolution, us and our cultures, that has continued to modify our genetics right up to the present. Indeed there is some evidence that our co-evolutionary process is accelerating, not abating. The Homo sapiens sapiens of today is not really the exact same species it was even 10,000 years ago.

Humans can abide as the Earth abides. But it will only be with understanding and intention. The very first question we have to ask has to address what a future human living condition will be like. Will we devolve to Olduvai status, or become something more than we are now?

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

The field of positive psychology is relatively young, focusing on what it means for humans to thrive, be happy, or feel fulfilled. One popular concept in this arena is self actualization, especially as developed in Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory. Maslow posited that humans are motivated by a set of needs that arc from the most basic biological (food, warmth) to social (love, esteem), to a higher self fulfillment or actualization, which includes mental states that permit higher thoughts and concepts, such as love of humanity as opposed to love of self. Several psychologists have considered versions of this sort of needs/drives architecture and a very full literature on subjects like creativity and success (e.g. ‘Flow’ in psychology). The general understanding in Maslow's theory is that as lower level needs are met and remain unthreatened (one has enough food and feels loved) the individual naturally moves into the mental space of actualization where they can be creative and develop positive attitudes toward others and themselves.

What this set of theories tell us about human beings is that they have the mental capacity to be marvelous beings given that their basic needs are being met. My own reading suggests that the happiest people are actually those who are actively participating in meeting their own needs. They are not necessarily individualists, but more generally are being productive members of a group effort that collectively provides for every one's needs in the group (and presumably for the few misfortunates who cannot directly contribute, and for children not yet ready to contribute).

In the modern industrialized/informationalized civilization where one would think all of our basic needs are being taken care of, it is hard to understand why so many people are unhappy and why we have become so unsapient. But the problem is that our materialistic views of what civilization should mean has done a pretty good job of taking care of needs at the lowest levels of the hierarchy (food, shelter, etc.) but has actually been contrary to the middle needs (sexually suggestive advertising and explicit sex scenes in movies are not substitutions for love). Our education and enterprise processes, designed to maximally take care of those material needs, does not address our self esteem needs. We try to compensate by telling our young kids what a great job they did on that drawing, or that they are special, or through grade inflation (don't get me started!) But we run people through the education mill in order that they have the requisite job skills to keep the machinery of commerce going. In my view this is the antithesis of self actualization. The only real higher needs we are supporting is the need for the psychopathic rich to get richer. I take solace in knowing that many of them are still not happy, really.

The bottom line is that humans, in general, really don't need the kind of materialistic world that our high powered energy and lack of wisdom has created to be happy or have the opportunity to self actualize. I think I understand how we got here. Once agriculture was swinging into full gear our societies became focused on managing everything to ensure maximum yield, usually against a very uncertain climate. We worked so hard at producing the basics that we sort of forgot that there is more to life than making a buck. Some so-called primitive tribes, the few left in this world, haven't forgotten, those that have been lucky enough to live in climates that provide the rich biological and hydrological resources they need. But we modern humans have forgotten. In fact, we perversely think that our McMansions and smart phones are the very definition of happiness.

The vast majority of people in the modern world do not seem to be able to grasp the essential difference between being glad to have the latest iPad and being self actualized. The former lets you get the latest updates on gossip, the latter lets you create something of value (even if you do it on an iPad!) I think one of the reasons that we have gotten to this point is that, as I mentioned above, evolution hasn't stopped. As a population we have been co-evolving with our materialistic cultures. We have created those cultures (but recognize that the actual acts of creation are done by very, very few people!) And in turn those cultures have selected for those who only want what those cultures offer - more materialism. And, as I have written before, this latter effect is what has helped select against higher sapience. One does not succeed in this world (either in monetary terms or in procreation) by being wise, only aggressive or lazy. Smarts help some to succeed monetarily, but it really doesn't take smarts to operate a refrigerator (to see a darkly humorous logical extreme watch the movie: “Ideocracy”)

The selection pressure of high powered industrial civilization has, unfortunately, tended to favor lower sapience. I think this also means it has disfavored the drive to self actualization. At the same time, paradoxically, it has provided a platform for the few bright people to discover new knowledge and produce amazing technologies. This was possible because the non-actualized masses provided a demand (as long as energy was available) and an impetus for novelty. It is ironic that, to paraphrase Dickens, ‘the best of times (knowledge) was made possible by the worst of times (unthinking consumption)’. But there you have it. The question is, now that the world is changing and the loss of energy will completely alter the consumption side of the equation, where do we go from here? Can we focus on the fact that some human beings, and especially those that seem to be more sapient than most, do self actualize in spite of the culture we live in? Can we use this knowledge to address the question of what would we like a future to look like given that we will not have the high powered energy sources of today? I think we can.

The Destination

If we start from the premise that what it means to be human is that each individual has the capacity and the opportunity to achieve higher states of awareness and understanding of the world, to become self actualized, then our destination has to be some kind of living condition in which that is made possible. I started writing about a ‘feasible’ living situation starting in Feb. of 2010. The series can be found here:

In this series I explored what kind of social structure and physical infrastructure would be necessary to provide a group of highly sapient individuals with a reasonable means of living sustainably and that would allow all members of that society to achieve some level of self actualization. I provided some basic ideas about what kind of land might be required under reasonable assumptions about the climate situation several hundred years from now. I have not seen any evidence that would alter my conclusions from that analysis, which are unhappy for the current population. The projected carrying capacity of the planet under extremely modest assumptions about consumption patterns of a sapient society is radically smaller than seven to ten billion people as currently projected by the UN through 2100. Given the reduced biodiversity of the near-term future (say the next 100,000 years or more) that carrying capacity will be greatly reduced even from what we currently project based on, say, ecological footprint analysis. It could be in the low tens of millions world wide.

Thus we are looking at a picture in which a few climatically stable pockets support a few villages containing a psychologically optimal number of individuals each. These might be in communication, even have trade with each other, but nothing like the inter-community commerce we see today. Life will revolve around the education and food growing systems, with construction and its support services on an as needed basis. People will basically do those things that satisfy the spirit. They will, of course, primarily be concerned with raising food. If done right they will have ample time for enjoyable times with family and friends. They will pursue their education, both in how to improve their living skills and how to better understand the world around them and their past. These need not and should not be peasants living just at subsistence. If that were the only option then would it really be worth there being a human species?

Humans are capable of growing mentally long after they finish growing physically. A society, careful to control its population size, can still grow in knowledge even though it is not growing economically (in the way we think of it now). The destination is self actualization for all. If we cannot find a pathway from where we are now to that destination then I'm not sure it is worth even stepping outside to start the journey. On the other hand, I strongly feel there is enough sapience in some members of the current species to find the path.

I have always had an adventurous spirit. And I think that it is likely that humanity will come out of the transition as a better species, that is wiser in the ways to live in balance with the Ecos. With that belief I'm game to explore some possible paths. I hope I don't have to go alone, because then, again, it isn't worth the effort. The future success of humanity will be based, as it always was in the past, on a collective effort of a group. We shall see what develops.

The First Step - Sacrifice in the Now

It is hard to contemplate doing something so radically different tomorrow, given that today things in the world seem almost normal. It is very difficult for anyone, even a very sapient person, to consider going and learning to live off the land with only real-time solar energy inputs while it is still possible to get in your car and run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and gallon of milk. The question is, do we start now to learn to live more balanced lives, or do we wait until the fan is on high and the fecal pellets are flying to make the move?

The problem with the latter is that we are in a relatively slow transition at present. The fan isn't blowing at maximum and the fecal matter is in such small quantities as to be nearly indiscernible. The danger with waiting is that we have been in an exponential growth mode for so long. The problem with exponential growth is that you can feel like everything is just fine until the crash comes. It is like walking toward a cliff in a pea soup dense fog. You're OK until you step off the edge. And then it is too late. It does no good to wish you had turned right or left instead of going straight while you are hurling toward the bottom.

We are in completely unknown territory now. We know with fairly high certainty that our energy flow is going to be diminished. And unless someone very quickly pulls a massive energy replacement rabbit out of the thermodynamic hat, nothing else we have on the shelf right now can scale up quickly and broadly enough to keep there from being a catastrophic loss when, for example, the oil stops flowing because the producers can no longer make profits, and then the coal stops flowing because it takes a lot of diesel fuel to get coal. Natural gas is still a big question as to the volume we might have to work with, but even with NG there are infrastructure conversion issues that will keep it from being an immediate substitute. The whole problem revolves around the fact that we just do not know how much net energy we have to work with from fossil fuels, but especially oil. If we are, as I have suggested based on my computer modelling, past the peak of net energy production, then we are already screwed.

And here is the main point. We don't know where we are relative to net energy. We can only make educated guesses, but they are still just guesses. If we are past the point of no return, how would be know it? As one of my favorite Brandi Carlile songs says “...there are no warnings, only signs.”

Since I advocate that only the highly sapient need apply, perhaps this provides a means for testing sapience potential without some of the genetic testing I've written about. Only the really sapient will see the practicality of sacrificing a few more years of the comfortable consumer lifestyle to start preparing now. I admit it is a sacrifice. It means finding a location with all the right attributes (you can't just start a permaculture farm nearby where you happen to live if the climate is unstable). It means cashing out your assets to trade for land and off-the-grid capabilities. And, by the way, this does not mean buying solar panels that you will be stuck with in twenty years, not able to get replacements or repairs! It means giving up what you are used to having now without really knowing for certain that this is the best thing to do.

Nor can you do anything like this alone. It will take a community. So not only do you have to make the decision to self-sacrifice now, but you have to convince others that they should do the same. Again this is a test of sapience. If any of your friends balk it probably means they wouldn't be great contributors to the situation anyway.

I see this process as one of self-organization rather than engineering a social group. The sufficiently sapient will recognize the signs and begin to take action, not waiting for warnings (at least from the official powers that be). They will find ways to find one another, especially in these days of social networking media. No one could orchestrate a successful transition. No one could dictate it or ‘run’ the community. It will have to come from a democratic and egalitarian process. It will necessarily be at the only scale in which such a process could ever succeed, a face-to-face community.

Other sacrifices are in the wings. Even if sapient communities become established they will need to be prepared for what will transpire in the rest of civilization. I will save this for another time, however. In the near future I will return to the physical aspects of a feasible living situation and try to explain better why so much land per individual is needed to establish a truly sustainable life. And then we can talk about how to establish it (like financing) and protect it once things start to come unglued. In the mean time it would be nice to know if any of this is helping anyone. I have received a few nice e-mails from folk saying that they get what I am talking about and would like more ideas put out there. This blog is a response to those. But I don't know if my thoughts are really helping.

Comments

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George, I find it very helpful. I have already taken a Permaculture course and am learning to grow food, albeit in my suburban backyard. It is a delicate game. How do I stay in the economy long enough to eliminate debt and acquire land? What about kids that still expect higher education? Where will climate be suitable and land affordable, sufficiently remote but not too hard to get to from my urban area? Arkansas? Missouri? Keep writing. Some of us are listening.

This series you have started looks to be interesting and will certainly be valuable to those intelligent and resourceful souls who endeavor to take action. Having said that, I'm still watching the rest of humanity which is under the enthralment of the mainstream culture and constitute a much greater percentage of the rest of the planet's population, at least in the industrialized nations.

I have a fear that individual action toward self-sufficiency, no matter how admirable and correct, will be taken down by the masses who are continuing on with business as usual.

Nonetheless, the sapient ones must follow through with what you are recommending.

George,
Your thoughts are always helpful! I wait with much anticipation for your next installments in this series. We've already made the decision to prepare for a low energy future and have sold our suburban McMansion and moved to 50 acres in a higher rainfall area. People question our wisdom daily. We've done this without likeminded community yet - someone has to go first! It's not much fun being first, but if we build it they will come.

Steve,
Many North Americans who discover and then embrace permaculture seem to end up in Ecuador. Reasonably stable govt, cheap prices, fantastic topsoil 15 feet deep and plenty of fresh water. Lots of sunshine for year round growing. I haven't researched it much because we're staying in Australia ourselves, but I have seen 20 acres of established permaculture food forest / kitchen garden with eco dwelling in Ecuador selling for US $240k. Obviously, you could get started on less land and live in a shed for a while, for much less outlay than this. But permaculture is about breathing life back into *your* bioregion. Permaculture has techniques for desert, tropics, cool temperate etc. Choose land with community and water if you can, but most importantly get what you can afford NOW and get on with it.
Nathan

George,
How would you determine the "sapience" of people?? Would a test be whether rather simple critical life-saving knowledge gets a response from sapient people, at least a little curiosity to start?

Keynes pointed out what to do when financial investment in exploiting the earth becomes excessive and starts making the economy as a whole unprofitable, driving it toward collapse. What he pointed out is a little counter intuitive, but easily confirmed as critically necessary. You need to persuade investors that it's in their self-interest to live in a healthy economy, and get them to spend their earnings.

The result is that their investments don't automatically multiply, so growth by the economy maturing to a healthy climax rather than exhausting its environment. His description is in Chaper 16 of The General Theory. There may be other ways to destroy an economy, but when you check it out there is no other possible way for a healthy market economy to achieve longevity.

I've raised the subject again and again for 30+ years, with a tremendous variety of people very well informed on the details of how environments and economies work. I've been doing it since having first heard about Keynes' version of this general principle of maturation from Ken Boulding. Ken had then been talking about it all over for 40+ years before me. The response that Keynes, Boulding and I have each gotten from almost everyone is "that's unthinkable" as a reason for them to wander off, leaving the subject to die.

So just as a somewhat stark example. Why isn't that a valid test of "sapience"? It's because such a remarkably small minority of critical thinkers is even open to discussing it, despite it being an easily proven necessity for societal survival on a limited planet. It says sapience isn't testable, doesn't it?

I obviously think the permaculture education is a right first move. There are some very tough questions and every individual/family is going to have variations and different priorities. This is why I think the only viable approach is one of community building with like-minded individuals where many minds can contribute to the conversations that might lead to answers.

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Xray,

Thanks. More to come.

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viveik,

I might suggest you take some time to get familiar with systems science/thinking as you plow ahead. It will make learning permaculture and other knowledge much easier as it is guide to how to recognize the "important" dots and then to connect them (as well as understand how the web changes over time).

I recommend "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella H. Meadows if you are new to systems science. Permaculture is the application of systems ecology (in particular) to living. Good luck.

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L.P.,

Must have been a Freudian slip, given that I see ideology as a main symptom of our time and idiocracy as the result! Thanks.

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Nathan,

Good on you and good luck. Interesting about Ecuador. I've heard rumblings of this before so maybe I'd better look into it. Thanks.

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Phil,

It probably comes down to the definition of sapience that you are using. Mine posits a brain basis and either genetic or imaging testing is at least feasible. There are probably quite a few psychological correlation tests that could be devised. The field of wisdom studies (in psychology) has already developed a number of probes that seem to correlate with good judgment in complex life-problem domains in older people, an indication that they had developed a fair amount of veridical tacit knowledge over their lifetimes.

In my version of sapience the brain facilities act in earlier life to provide judgments about what knowledge to gain, what information to attend to. This would include correlates in curiosity and ability to see relations that matter over the long term. I suspect there are ways to test these capabilities.

What we should be very careful to not do is conflate intelligence with sapience. While the two are strongly correlated in terms of strength (as shown in the wisdom research) they are not the same thing.

i don't think the global climate change to come is going to cooperate with humanities' last gasp efforts to survive after all the damage we've done. To get an idea of how bad it's becoming we only have to look upon THIS YEAR to see that the trend is not only continuing but getting worse by the year with the spring flooding in the midwest, followed by increasingly strong tornados and the extended drought in Texas.
[Now we have a rare earthquake on the east coast (just a small part of the bigger global picture) and Hurricane Irene barreling up the coast.]

Looks like, projecting into the future about 5 years and it should be painfully obvious to everyone that we're on our way out - BY OUR OWN HAND!

There are plenty of folks out there preaching the collapse gospel as well. They cover the spectrum from financial advise to guns & ammo, and from advice at $500/hour to free blogs.

The proof or the pudding is in the eating. When setting out on after a particular preachment, one should make sure that one is EMULATING the source. If they have started a business charging $500/hour for advise, while ignoring the advice themselves, then one should do likewise. If they are prolifically writing books and producing documentaries while themselves ignoring the advice, that is the course to emulate.

The carbon-based, soft-skinned human ape species lives precariously on a warm, wet, molten-centered rock orbiting an insignificant star in an equally unremarkable solar system in a galaxy far, far away from the center of the known universe. We are far more vulnerable than we imagine to grid-disabling, civilization-ending CMEs, asteroid impacts, pole shifts, Yellowstone-like eruptions, and any number of mass-extinction events that could wipe us out literally in the blink of an ape's eye, or perhaps no longer than a few weeks or months.

Were this conditioned into the brain physiology and mass-consciousness of the human ape species collectively, would the wisest among us permit (have permitted) the suicidal rate of growth of population, resource consumption, and waste of the past 30-40 to 100+ years?

If we are collectively fatalistic or suicidal as a species, as one might argue, then we are unlikely to do anything of consequence to prevent or postpone a mass die-off of the human ape species.

Thus, if mass die-off is inevitable, the lot of us perhaps are innately aware of our eventual fate, human life being as short as it is, and our steep discount rate for consumption being what it is, why would not most of us human apes want to party as long and as well as we can until we can't?

If so, how would the most sapient among us perceive this situation? In the interest of self-preservation of the allegedly wisest among us, might we not see the merit in facilitating the process of mass die-off for the vast majority of party apes?

Why allow the party animals to suck down all the good swill and stuff their faces with the fat of the land, leaving the sapient remnant to pick among the scraps left after the party is over and the die-off has commenced and culled a significant share of the masses?

Can the sapients permit the party animals to commit suicide on their own good time? Or should the sapients find an efficient, low-entropy, humane, and just way to expedite the die-off at whatever scale is practical?

Who among the human ape population would decide who lives and who dies? Would it be the banksters? The shadowy Power Elite? Scientists? Philosophers? Clergy? Corporate leaders? Politicians? Engineers? Military leaders?

What moral, ethical, philosophical, metaphysical, or scientific rationalization can justly be applied?

Given a potentially worse fate than a quick death, can one not envision a group of like-minded sapients dispassionately devising a timely end for the vast mass of the rest of us?

Will the sapients see fit to use escalating wars? Pandemics? Genetically engineered viruses? Famine? Racial and ethnic conflict and genocide? Attrition? All of the above, and more?

George, an interesting topic for a post would be speculating on the actual number of years left to collapse. I would propose the D-date would be the point in time when money becomes worthless, A few years ago I would have said that we have ten years left, but I would say now I feel it is less than that. Maybe readers could post their guesses?

John, at the trend rates of growth of private GDP, gov't deficit spending, net interest on the debt held by the public, and China-Asia's oil consumption and imports, I project the D Day for de facto US insolvency (net interest reaches or exceeds 25% of US gov't receipts) and breakdown of US-China diplomatic relations and trade (and even indications of military conflict between the West and China) to be no later than '16-'17.

In the meantime, data indicate the potential for another global deflationary contraction and BIG bear market (50%+) over the next 18-24 months, including The China Crash, which is likely to be coincident with the U rate rising above 10% and deficits of 100% of total US gov't tax revenues.

The Fed will be compelled to print money to fund banks' purchases of US Treasury issuances that will in large part go toward just covering net interest costs on the US public debt, which could double by the end of the decade.

The bulk of gov't deficit spending will go to income maintenance and subsistence for the aged (increasingly Baby Boomers), poor, and working poor, including unemployment, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, etc., not to any net "stimulus" to overall economic activity.

Local and state gov'ts have not even begun to stem the flow of red ink, and they will be hit again with falling receipts and deeper cuts to capital and infrastructure spending, jobs, benefits, pension payouts, etc.

The Japanese disaster, tornadoes, floods, heat wave, EU debt debacle, and now hurricane will push the teetering global economy into another recession (not that real private GDP per capita ever recovered).

Therefore, expect the Bernanke Fed, ECB, BOE, and BOJ to announce QE3 (or QEn . . . n+1 or QE 3.0); but the additional reserves will end up as cash and gov't debt at banks and insurers, providing next to no stimulus and coinciding with money velocity and the multiplier further plunging.

WRT to money becoming worthless, risk aversion and liquidity preference among Boomers and the general public will surge in the years ahead, making cash today about as unappreciated and undervalued as it can get vs. just about every other asset or debt-money substitute, including gold and silver.

IOW, cash available to be spent after debt service and taxes will be at falling velocity and in high demand vs. the high relative hoarding value of gold and the low, or no, income stream from fixed-income and overvalued equity assets.

One cannot spend gold and silver as currency. One must exchange it for "worthless" fiat digital debt-money currency in order to realize the purchasing power of gold as a debt-money substitute. When the hoarding value of gold far exceeds its production and relative exchange value vs. the outstanding currency and its velocity, by definition the value of the hoarding substitute declines as it is eventually exchanged for currency.

Thus, I will not be surprised were the price of gold and other commodities to crash 50%+ during the next global deflationary contraction and BIG bear market.

I've done my share of speculation on the timing; nothing quite as abrupt as you are suggesting WRT the END.

The truth of it is that we humans were instrumental in changing the environment in such a way that we may no longer be fit as a species. I don't think that means total extinction of Homo, at least I hope not.

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Robin,

Cryptic? I was wondering where I might fit in this?

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Bruce,

(1)
It is probably not a good idea to second guess the supersapients! I think it unlikely that anyone with enough 'power' to take effective action, whatever that would be, would be among the supersapients. In the end there is a force that will take care of everything and that is evolution. While I can see some supersapients preparing and doing what is needed to survive and provide Homo with a future, I don't see them being quite as proactive as some of your speculations suggest. The Earth will abide in spite of the change agents we've set in motion. Life of some kind will continue. I just hope it includes some form of sentient beings who, maybe, learned some lessons from our example.

(2)
Sounds like you've done a lot of thinking about the financial side of this long emergency!

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David A.,

Thanks for the support.

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John D.

From my perspective we are already in collapse. The beginning of the end is already in the rear view mirror. My thought is that there might not be a definitive "collapse" event that is clear to all. Right now, for some people in our society things have already collapsed.

I'm in some agreement with John Michael Greer, that the decline will be in fits and starts. We will even continue to have periods of seeming recovery (the current period seems to be of this sort).

I see the decline as a set of diminishing pulses. With each period of rapid decline a greater portion of the population will fall into despair. At some point, here in the US, we may even see a major unraveling of our so-called democratic government and a likely dictatorship as the people turn to a strong man to save them. I'm sure most of us will feel like that is the collapse, but if it happens it may actually buy some time for whoever remains with their heads above water (the elite).

In other words, I'm not sure there is any real demarcation between normal and collapse. It will be a drawn out process. But, as I said, I think it is already well under way. So every person will have to assess their own futures and consider when it is time to jump out of the 'normal' society and into a lifeboat.

"What about kids that still expect higher education?" I would get them a copy of Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" along with George's recommended "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella H. Meadows. The heartbeat of "higher education" is specialization and it has made it extremely difficult for most to be able to recognize that there are limits to growth.

George,

I think that it will be easy to put all the collapse eggs in the wrong basket. As a consequence, I would recommend that potential permaculturists put resources in an organization that owns property in diverse locations around the world. Those who have capital, but no skills, would share access with those who have skills (or are willing to learn the skills), but no capital. Let's be honest, most of the capital today is held by those with no productive skills.

'“What’s interesting is not that we have so much biological diversity and evolutionary change, but that we have so little,” Uyeda said. “It’s a paradox as to why evolution should be so slow.” [It is?!]

Long periods of little change, Uyeda said, are called “stasis,” a pattern that originally led to the concept of “punctuated equilibrium,” controversial when it was first proposed in the early 1970s. This research supports the overall pattern of stasis and punctuational change. However, Uyeda says there may be different causal mechanisms at work than have often been proposed.
“We believe that for changes to persist, the underlying force that caused them has to also persist and be widespread,” Uyeda said.

“This isn’t just some chance genetic mutation that takes over,” he said. “Evolutionary adaptations are caused by some force of natural selection such as environmental change, predation or anthropogenic disturbance, and these forces have to continue and become widespread for the change to persist and accumulate. That’s slower and more rare than one might think.”

Though slow, however, the process appears to be relentless. Most species change so much that they rarely ever last more than 1-10 million years before going extinct, or developing into a new species, the scientists noted.

The exact cause of these long-term, persistent evolutionary changes is not certain. The scientists said that climate change, in itself, does not appear to be a driving force, because many species have remained substantially unchanged over time periods when climates changed dramatically.'

This argues all the more for the higher probability that our oil-based civilization and evolutionary phase is transitory as Hubbert argued, and the Olduvai Theory implies about the longevity of industrial civilization being a century or so, i.e., not persistent enough to force lasting adaption and selection.

That we evolved to be what we are over millions of years as low-entropy species with just a fraction of the population we have today suggests that, were we to persist a million or more years hence, we are more likely than not to re-evolve from a high- to low-entropy species at a dramatically smaller population, whether or not that includes what we today refer to as "civilization".

Recall the 1960s "Star Trek" episode about the overpopulation of the planet Gideon and the "solution" the leaders implemented. "Life is sacred. That the love of life is the greatest gift. That is the one unshakable truth of Gideon. This overwhelming love of life has developed our regenerative capacity and our great longevity."

What percentage of westerners know how many "energy slaves" per person are required to maintain our obscenely wasteful, inefficient system of economic and political organization, allocation, and distribution? I wager it is in the low single-digit percentages.

Now, imagine the Asian half of the population of the planet attempting to appropriate their own 100-150 "energy slaves" per capita to achieve a western standard of material consumption, with US supranational corporations investing billions of dollars to encourage it.

George, You responded to my Aug 23 question about how to test individuals for sapience on Aug 23 above. I don't think you caught my drift. I gave the example of a whole culture of normal people that unquestionably fail any test of sapience, who mostly think of themselves and often of each other as rather "sapient".

That culture is us, of course, with our stark raving mad beliefs like our world consensus, involving 98% of the scientific community, to accelerate resource depletion forever as a way to sustain prosperity. There are also other strangely misguided policies that extremely broad range of seemingly intelligent people agree on too.

I've been trying to get you and others to discuss these curiously insurmountable "dysfunctional fixations", with no success so far. Why do you think that is? I'd think the presence of undiscussed gaps in our assumptions about the mental competence of our culture would be important to discuss. I think there might be a physical world, and our knowledge culture generally treats it as a social construct.

The evidence is that we need "sapience" more than ever, of course, but it's not to be found in our brains. Where it's so starkly missing is from our culture.